Civic coalition urges UNESCO to fast-track comfort-women archive listing

On Sunday, a coalition of civil-society groups from eight countries, among them South Korea and China, called on UNESCO to accelerate the stalled process of inscribing comfort-women documents on the Memory of the World Register. The dossier, titled "Voices of the Comfort Women," comprises first-hand testimonies and other evidence of the sexual slavery imposed by Japanese forces during World War II. After the coalition’s formal request in May 2016, UNESCO’s International Advisory Committee in 2017 opted to facilitate dialogue with four additional submitters from Japan and the United States, postponing the first round of talks that were meant to occur in June 2025.

Those negotiations have now been delayed twice. The advocates stress that the pool of surviving victims is rapidly diminishing, with only a handful remaining in South Korea, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste.